Contentions

A majority of the House would have voted to extend all the Bush tax cuts, but Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t allow a vote. The president’s class-warfare gambit went down the drain. And now he’s coming up with new excuses for why he’s championing a massive tax increase at a meeting of his economic advisory board:

Obama gave his most detailed response to date to [former budget director, Peter] Orszag’s attention-grabbing debut column in the New York Times in which the ex-OMB maven suggested the White House would be wise to accede to a deal in which the Bush-era income tax cuts were extended for two years for all income levels — and then allowed to expire.

Orszag’s fallback position was advanced by Harvard Economist Martin Feldstein and former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson more enthusiastically than Orszag did. Obama said, in essence, that their stance was intellectually legit, but politically naive.

“The consequences of extending the upper-income tax cuts, based on what we’ve heard fairly explicitly in the political environment, is that you do that now you’re going to do it forever,” Obama said. “There’s not going to be necessarily a deal that says — as Martin, I think — an entirely respectable position is to say extend them all for two years and then they go away. I mean, that’s an intellectually consistent position. But that’s not really the position that is being promoted up on Capitol Hill.”

Actually, that is precisely the position being promoted — a two-year extension — by Democrats. He now seems to be contending — though his argument is less than crystal clear — that once you continue to uphold lower tax rates, people will want to keep them at that reduced rate. Forever!

No wonder his poll numbers and those of his party are sinking. More shocking than the president’s flimflammery is his ongoing disdain for the private sector:

“There’s this concern about the business community’s attitude about the administration. And it’s not just the business community, it’s high-income individuals, entrepreneurs and others. And so the increase in the tax on those individuals is a signal that the administration” — Feldstein said.

“They have to pay slightly higher taxes,” Obama interrupted.

“That they’re going to have to pay higher taxes, and it may be even more going forward,” Feldstein said.

There you have it. Even as his poll numbers continue to sink, the public becomes increasingly convinced that he doesn’t “get it” when it comes to the economy, the recovery stalls, and a chunk of his party rises in revolt, Obama’s answer remains the same on tax hikes: the “rich” and businesses can handle it. Remarkable.